Posted by willcritchlow

You’ve got all the links you need, right?

No matter how advanced an SEO you are, there are few people who can make that claim (in-house at Wikipedia, maybe?). For the rest of us, there’s more to learn.

Over the last couple of weeks, I have been working with our speakers to plan the sessions for the advanced link building conferences we are running in New Orleans and London. Keep reading for the full line up of speakers and sessions.

I have learnt a load of things just in speaking to all these experts during prep. I can’t wait to hear the gems they are going to share in person. We’re focussing on the advanced end of things – I’ve asked all our speakers to focus on teaching you things I don’t already know. Our speakers are ready to deliver only the most up-to-date advice and implementable suggestions for taking your link building project to the next level. Further down on this page, we’ve got details of what each and every one of these experts will be teaching you.

In the meantime, here are the particulars:

• London – 18th March 2011: (tickets cost £399 +VAT - or £299 +VAT with SEOmoz PRO)
• New Orleans – 25th March 2011:  (tickets cost $600 - or $450 with SEOmoz PRO)

Incidentally, remember that SEOmoz currently has a free trial promotion running for PRO membership. We’re offering a PRO discount on the training. Yes, that means you just need to sign up for the SEOmoz free trial to get the discount.

This post is all about making the pitch that you should make the trip. The cities are worth it just for themselves – in the words of the everywhereist:

New Orleans:

"I suggest you put down whatever you are doing and go, immediately."

London:

"I am finding myself with the overwhelming desire to pack up my bag and hop on the next flight to Heathrow"

As well as all the serious learning, there’ll be an opportunity to hang out with the speakers and attendees at after-parties in both cities. I can’t wait.

Who is speaking?

The line-up is pretty damn cool – we only ask people to come and speak when we have seen them deliver the goods before and then we brief them to give the presentation of their lives. The goal is advanced tips and tricks. You know how the value is normally shared privately in the bar at conferences? We’re trying to push that stuff on stage. Here’s the line-up:

• Rand Fishkin (you might have heard of him) – always pushing the boundaries of the next thing you need to know, Rand’s presentations are always unmissable and we push him hard to bring his best material to these sessions
• Wil Reynolds of Seer Interactive - Wil is not only one of the smartest SEOs I’ve ever met, but you can’t help but smile as you watch him speak. The man’s a dynamo. I can’t wait to hear some more of his stories.
• Jane Copland of Ayima - many of you got to know Jane during her days at SEOmoz before she moved across the pond to Ayima. Few people have worked hands-on with the kinds of brands that Jane sees daily. She’s bringing some great tips and I’m thrilled to have her speaking at another of our events.
• Russ Jones of Virante - I have learnt huge amounts from Russ over the years. Back when I got started in SEO, we used to exchange views right here in the SEOmoz comments. He’s one of those rare people who combines technical and marketing chops. The stuff he talked about when we spoke to plan his session was brilliant. A must-see speaker.
• Chris Bennett of 97th Floor (US only) – Chris is not only a nice guy, he runs one of the most effective link building companies around and he’s promised to share his secrets. I last saw him speak in London last year and I’m still trying to incorporate some of the lessons into the way we do things.
• Martin MacDonald of Seatwave (UK) and Kris Roadruck of click2rank (US) – two guys who have taught me more than I sometimes want to know about the shadier arts. Both can play the whitehat game, but both know exactly what works and where the limits are. I’m pushing them hard to share the real secrets of their research so that those of us who work with clients and brands can learn appropriate tactics and amuse ourselves with tales of derring-do.
• Not forgetting myself, Distilled’s own Tom Critchlow and Paddy Moogan (UK only) - you probably know Tom and me. Some of you might not know that Tom is now in Seattle running SEO and content for SEOmoz for a few months and working with our US office. It’s been great learning and growing alongside my bro over the last few years – I don’t think it’s biased to say that he has a lot to teach. Many of you will also know Paddy who is one of our more recent UK hires and team leads (if you don’t know Paddy, I recommend reading one of his recent personal blog posts to get a feeling for the passion he brings to his work – he’s one of the most effective SEOs I know).
  

What are they going to be talking about?

Link building mistakes – Wil Reynolds

I was as shocked as anyone to hear that Wil has made mistakes. Luckily he’s man enough to tell us about them and help us avoid making the same ones. He’ll also be calling out some of us (in a friendly way) with "link building mistakes made by advanced SEOs":

• Common misconceptions
• Mistakes made by advanced SEOs
• Mistakes we’ve made and lessons we’ve learnt
• Too much strategy = no actual links. Too little strategy = poor results. How do you find the right balance?

Getting actions from competitor research – Jane Copland

There has been plenty written about clever ways to see what your competitors are doing to build links. Jane is going to be showing us how you should build an actual plan based on what you see from your competitor research:

• Why should you bother researching what your competitors are doing?
• What should you do when you find different kinds of links and tactics?
• What should you definitely not copy? – How to work out what is not actually helping other sites

Where to get the old "linkbait on digg" effect – Russ Jones

You remember when Digg could take your server down? Definitely happened to me a few times. Before Digg it was Slashdot (OK, I’m showing my age now). What works now? How should you go about getting links to your linkbait these days? Russ and his company are at the forefront of understanding this stuff and he has some amazing data and great insights to share. He’s going to talk about:

• Infographics and widget-bait on social media
• How to use real-time analytics
• Real-world statistics – insight into actual traffic from different sites
  • Where are the up-and-coming traffic sources?
  • Who’s on the decline?
• How do you actually get links from your linkbait [with real case studies and examples]

How to structure a major link building project – Tom Critchlow

You may have heard by now that Tom is in Seattle for a few months running SEO and content strategy for SEOmoz. He’s already feeling the pressure of doing SEO under the microscope, so we thought we’d just turn that up a couple notches. He is going to present his strategy for getting SEOmoz the links they need (once he’s worked out what those are!). Thanks to Rand and the team for their typical transparency in allowing Tom to talk about all of this publicly. The details of this session are TBC because Tom hasn’t done the work yet (he landed in Seattle on Saturday), but I imagine it will cover:

• Working out what links SEOmoz needs
• Thinking about how to move the needle on a site with millions of inbound links
• Building a link building ethos into the company (he’s only there for a few months so it has to continue after he’s gone)
• What developers, product people, community managers and executives can do to build links

We’re all pretty excited to see the results of this one, as you can imagine. It’s a rare chance to see into the inner workings of a link building campaign.

Myths and case studies of outreach success – Paddy Moogan (UK) and Chris Bennett (US)

When I’m talking to people at conferences and answering Q&A, outreach is one of the topics that people find hardest to get their head around and make work consistently. Paddy and Chris bring different perspectives to this one, but both of them will be talking about:

• Content that works
• Great content != links
  • Outreach for traffic
  • Outreach for branding
  • Outreach for links
• Tips and tricks of what actually works in the real world

And that takes us up to lunch time! I feel tired already just thinking about it.

After lunch:

The future of link building – Rand Fishkin

We are increasingly seeing that off-site signals other than traditional followed links are critically important parts of any link building campaign. Rand called this before it was officially announced and I’m excited to hear him talk about the impact some of these new signals have on ranking as well as analysing some other recent trends to look into the future of link building:

• Social media shares that aren’t links
  • Why you should care
  • How to get them
• The benefits of nofollow / private / emailed links
• The impact of usage data
• The future of search engines’ link analysis
  • Context / LDA
  • Page analysis, chunking and position on the page

Lessons from the dark side – Martin MacDonald (UK) and Kris Roadruck (US)

Following the strategic, forward-looking session from Rand, we’re going to head straight into some down-and-dirty ‘effective’ tactics. Martin and Kris consistently blow my mind with the information they share in private. I’m pulling them, blinking, into the light. I believe that every SEO should have an appropriate interest in darker tactics to really understand how everything works. You’d be amazed at the filthy tactics some of the whitest SEOs have experimented with on their own time.

Martin and Kris have promised to share some of the tactics they know work that they’d normally only talk about over a beer. You’d never use these on a client or brand site, but in my opinion, you need to understand why they work and learn to apply some of the principles and automation to your day job:

• Disclaimer [important!]
• LinkSoup – the vital ingredients of a great link and how to mix them together
• How to make links and influence the SERPs
• Watch your back… links
• Go big or go home – how to scale, automate and compete

Scaling white hat link building – Me

White hat link building tactics tend to be labour-intensive. If you really want to compete with white hat tactics, you need to think hard about how you can scale without access to all the automation and time-saving tricks of your greyer competitors. Some of this is sensibly learning from them where you can, some is accepting that you need to scale with elbow grease and thinking about how you can manage that. I will be covering:

• Ways to scale
  • Manpower
  • Budget
  • Automation
  • Outsourcing
• The role of scalable content
  • Why and how
  • Cost vs. quality
• Incorporating brand and strategy

Expert Q&A and final tips

What’s the point of getting all these experts in a room if you can’t hear their biggest secrets? There will be Q&A at the end of each session for specific questions, but we’ll also be wrapping up each day with a group session where each speaker gives up their top tip and all the speakers answer the audience’s toughest questions.

In the UK, we will be dedicating this session to the memory of Jaamit Durrani who passed away at the end of last year and whose passion for sharing knowledge was unsurpassed. Some of his family and OMD colleagues will be there and the evening drinks will include a fundraising element in his memory.

If all of this sounds like your kind of thing, go book your tickets. Don’t forget the PRO discount (go get yourself a free month’s PRO trial if you need it to get the discount).

In addition to the unparalleled expertise we have gathered together, we have some social fun planned as well. The VIP dinners the night before the shows are now sold out in both venues, but there will be a chance to pick the speakers’ brains and mingle with other attendees over drinks at after-parties in both cities.

I look forward to seeing you there.

Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted by willcritchlow

You’ve got all the links you need, right?

No matter how advanced an SEO you are, there are few people who can make that claim (in-house at Wikipedia, maybe?). For the rest of us, there’s more to learn.

Over the last couple of weeks, I have been working with our speakers to plan the sessions for the advanced link building conferences we are running in New Orleans and London. Keep reading for the full line up of speakers and sessions.

I have learnt a load of things just in speaking to all these experts during prep. I can’t wait to hear the gems they are going to share in person. We’re focussing on the advanced end of things – I’ve asked all our speakers to focus on teaching you things I don’t already know. Our speakers are ready to deliver only the most up-to-date advice and implementable suggestions for taking your link building project to the next level. Further down on this page, we’ve got details of what each and every one of these experts will be teaching you.

In the meantime, here are the particulars:

• London – 18th March 2011: (tickets cost £399 +VAT - or £299 +VAT with SEOmoz PRO)
• New Orleans – 25th March 2011:  (tickets cost $600 - or $450 with SEOmoz PRO)

Incidentally, remember that SEOmoz currently has a free trial promotion running for PRO membership. We’re offering a PRO discount on the training. Yes, that means you just need to sign up for the SEOmoz free trial to get the discount.

This post is all about making the pitch that you should make the trip. The cities are worth it just for themselves – in the words of the everywhereist:

New Orleans:

"I suggest you put down whatever you are doing and go, immediately."

London:

"I am finding myself with the overwhelming desire to pack up my bag and hop on the next flight to Heathrow"

As well as all the serious learning, there’ll be an opportunity to hang out with the speakers and attendees at after-parties in both cities. I can’t wait.

Who is speaking?

The line-up is pretty damn cool – we only ask people to come and speak when we have seen them deliver the goods before and then we brief them to give the presentation of their lives. The goal is advanced tips and tricks. You know how the value is normally shared privately in the bar at conferences? We’re trying to push that stuff on stage. Here’s the line-up:

• Rand Fishkin (you might have heard of him) – always pushing the boundaries of the next thing you need to know, Rand’s presentations are always unmissable and we push him hard to bring his best material to these sessions
• Wil Reynolds of Seer Interactive - Wil is not only one of the smartest SEOs I’ve ever met, but you can’t help but smile as you watch him speak. The man’s a dynamo. I can’t wait to hear some more of his stories.
• Jane Copland of Ayima - many of you got to know Jane during her days at SEOmoz before she moved across the pond to Ayima. Few people have worked hands-on with the kinds of brands that Jane sees daily. She’s bringing some great tips and I’m thrilled to have her speaking at another of our events.
• Russ Jones of Virante - I have learnt huge amounts from Russ over the years. Back when I got started in SEO, we used to exchange views right here in the SEOmoz comments. He’s one of those rare people who combines technical and marketing chops. The stuff he talked about when we spoke to plan his session was brilliant. A must-see speaker.
• Chris Bennett of 97th Floor (US only) – Chris is not only a nice guy, he runs one of the most effective link building companies around and he’s promised to share his secrets. I last saw him speak in London last year and I’m still trying to incorporate some of the lessons into the way we do things.
• Martin MacDonald of Seatwave (UK) and Kris Roadruck of click2rank (US) – two guys who have taught me more than I sometimes want to know about the shadier arts. Both can play the whitehat game, but both know exactly what works and where the limits are. I’m pushing them hard to share the real secrets of their research so that those of us who work with clients and brands can learn appropriate tactics and amuse ourselves with tales of derring-do.
• Not forgetting myself, Distilled’s own Tom Critchlow and Paddy Moogan (UK only) - you probably know Tom and me. Some of you might not know that Tom is now in Seattle running SEO and content for SEOmoz for a few months and working with our US office. It’s been great learning and growing alongside my bro over the last few years – I don’t think it’s biased to say that he has a lot to teach. Many of you will also know Paddy who is one of our more recent UK hires and team leads (if you don’t know Paddy, I recommend reading one of his recent personal blog posts to get a feeling for the passion he brings to his work – he’s one of the most effective SEOs I know).
  

What are they going to be talking about?

Link building mistakes – Wil Reynolds

I was as shocked as anyone to hear that Wil has made mistakes. Luckily he’s man enough to tell us about them and help us avoid making the same ones. He’ll also be calling out some of us (in a friendly way) with "link building mistakes made by advanced SEOs":

• Common misconceptions
• Mistakes made by advanced SEOs
• Mistakes we’ve made and lessons we’ve learnt
• Too much strategy = no actual links. Too little strategy = poor results. How do you find the right balance?

Getting actions from competitor research – Jane Copland

There has been plenty written about clever ways to see what your competitors are doing to build links. Jane is going to be showing us how you should build an actual plan based on what you see from your competitor research:

• Why should you bother researching what your competitors are doing?
• What should you do when you find different kinds of links and tactics?
• What should you definitely not copy? – How to work out what is not actually helping other sites

Where to get the old "linkbait on digg" effect – Russ Jones

You remember when Digg could take your server down? Definitely happened to me a few times. Before Digg it was Slashdot (OK, I’m showing my age now). What works now? How should you go about getting links to your linkbait these days? Russ and his company are at the forefront of understanding this stuff and he has some amazing data and great insights to share. He’s going to talk about:

• Infographics and widget-bait on social media
• How to use real-time analytics
• Real-world statistics – insight into actual traffic from different sites
  • Where are the up-and-coming traffic sources?
  • Who’s on the decline?
• How do you actually get links from your linkbait [with real case studies and examples]

How to structure a major link building project – Tom Critchlow

You may have heard by now that Tom is in Seattle for a few months running SEO and content strategy for SEOmoz. He’s already feeling the pressure of doing SEO under the microscope, so we thought we’d just turn that up a couple notches. He is going to present his strategy for getting SEOmoz the links they need (once he’s worked out what those are!). Thanks to Rand and the team for their typical transparency in allowing Tom to talk about all of this publicly. The details of this session are TBC because Tom hasn’t done the work yet (he landed in Seattle on Saturday), but I imagine it will cover:

• Working out what links SEOmoz needs
• Thinking about how to move the needle on a site with millions of inbound links
• Building a link building ethos into the company (he’s only there for a few months so it has to continue after he’s gone)
• What developers, product people, community managers and executives can do to build links

We’re all pretty excited to see the results of this one, as you can imagine. It’s a rare chance to see into the inner workings of a link building campaign.

Myths and case studies of outreach success – Paddy Moogan (UK) and Chris Bennett (US)

When I’m talking to people at conferences and answering Q&A, outreach is one of the topics that people find hardest to get their head around and make work consistently. Paddy and Chris bring different perspectives to this one, but both of them will be talking about:

• Content that works
• Great content != links
  • Outreach for traffic
  • Outreach for branding
  • Outreach for links
• Tips and tricks of what actually works in the real world

And that takes us up to lunch time! I feel tired already just thinking about it.

After lunch:

The future of link building – Rand Fishkin

We are increasingly seeing that off-site signals other than traditional followed links are critically important parts of any link building campaign. Rand called this before it was officially announced and I’m excited to hear him talk about the impact some of these new signals have on ranking as well as analysing some other recent trends to look into the future of link building:

• Social media shares that aren’t links
  • Why you should care
  • How to get them
• The benefits of nofollow / private / emailed links
• The impact of usage data
• The future of search engines’ link analysis
  
  • Context / LDA
  • Page analysis, chunking and position on the page

Lessons from the dark side – Martin MacDonald (UK) and Kris Roadruck (US)

Following the strategic, forward-looking session from Rand, we’re going to head straight into some down-and-dirty ‘effective’ tactics. Martin and Kris consistently blow my mind with the information they share in private. I’m pulling them, blinking, into the light. I believe that every SEO should have an appropriate interest in darker tactics to really understand how everything works. You’d be amazed at the filthy tactics some of the whitest SEOs have experimented with on their own time.

Martin and Kris have promised to share some of the tactics they know work that they’d normally only talk about over a beer. You’d never use these on a client or brand site, but in my opinion, you need to understand why they work and learn to apply some of the principles and automation to your day job:

• Disclaimer [important!]
• LinkSoup – the vital ingredients of a great link and how to mix them together
• How to make links and influence the SERPs
• Watch your back… links
• Go big or go home – how to scale, automate and compete

Scaling white hat link building – Me

White hat link building tactics tend to be labour-intensive. If you really want to compete with white hat tactics, you need to think hard about how you can scale without access to all the automation and time-saving tricks of your greyer competitors. Some of this is sensibly learning from them where you can, some is accepting that you need to scale with elbow grease and thinking about how you can manage that. I will be covering:

• Ways to scale
  • Manpower
  • Budget
  • Automation
  • Outsourcing
• The role of scalable content
  • Why and how
  • Cost vs. quality
• Incorporating brand and strategy

Expert Q&A and final tips

What’s the point of getting all these experts in a room if you can’t hear their biggest secrets? There will be Q&A at the end of each session for specific questions, but we’ll also be wrapping up each day with a group session where each speaker gives up their top tip and all the speakers answer the audience’s toughest questions.

In the UK, we will be dedicating this session to the memory of Jaamit Durrani who passed away at the end of last year and whose passion for sharing knowledge was unsurpassed. Some of his family and OMD colleagues will be there and the evening drinks will include a fundraising element in his memory.

If all of this sounds like your kind of thing, go book your tickets. Don’t forget the PRO discount (go get yourself a free month’s PRO trial if you need it to get the discount).

In addition to the unparalleled expertise we have gathered together, we have some social fun planned as well. The VIP dinners the night before the shows are now sold out in both venues, but there will be a chance to pick the speakers’ brains and mingle with other attendees over drinks at after-parties in both cities.

I look forward to seeing you there.

Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted by randfish

Your online identity is going further, faster and with more impact than ever before, yet many of us miss out on the seemingly obvious SEO power of our personal and company biographies. It may be a headsmacker, but it’s a good one – use your bio!

Personal/professional bios appear most frequently in four types of online sources:

1. Your Company/Personal Website – for example, I have a bio on SEOmoz and here on my personal blog
2. Events, Conferences and Webinars – here’s my profile on the Searchfest site, on OMS and SMX
3. Content or Causes you Author/Contribute to – here’s an old piece on the Y! Advertising Blog, some content I contributed for Brightedge’s blog and an interview I did with Mixergy
4. Social/Web Profiles that Enable Full-Featured Bios – here I am on TED Conversations, on LinkedIn and Quora and 

In many of these scenarios, I’ve not been strategic or smart about making the bio sections more useful for readers or optimal for SEO.

The image below shows some of the potential opportunities you can capture:

There’s a few best practices to take away:

• A great bio should have links – it’s not just for SEO; users want to know, too! If I love a post or a piece of content or am inspired/interested by a line I read about someone, I should have the opportunity to learn more. That’s why those links exist.
• Co-citation is potentially important here. If I use the words "SEOmoz" and "SEO Software" together, there’s a much better chance that over time, I’ll get Google/Bing to recognize that the two are related. Currently, thanks to our history, they’re much more likely to think that SEOmoz is a consulting company (I almost made "consulting" an image, just to over-emphasize that point).
• Quantity of links and where they point is up to you. In the example above, I’ve got a lot of links – maybe too many, but because they’re not aggressive with anchor text or clearly just there for search engines, it doesn’t come across poorly (plus, as an SEO guy, folks might get suspicious if I didn’t try linking in my profile!)
• Length is often flexible – you may wish to work on several versions from the very short, one sentence snippet to the several paragraphs often afforded you on some sites/spaces.

I’m certainly not suggesting that we should all go stuff our profiles with obviously-SEO-intended links, using idealized anchor text for search engines to the point where it’s barely readable. But, I would suggest that having an SEO review the strategy of evangelists, speakers and contributors of folks across your organization is likely a great idea. This is one of the most white-hat, natural and powerful forms of link building — it’s just poorly executed much of the time.

Recognize the opportunity – be as aggressive as you feel is appropriate with third parties who post your bio (to get the description you want) and be sure to think carefully about branding, co-citation and keywords.

p.s. Linkscape’s web index just updated! New stats are below:

• Pages:  41,806,430,494
• Root Domains: 111,479,320
• Subdomains: 387,061,888
• Links: 423,876,083,081
• % of Links that are Nofollowed: 2.18%
• Average # of Links/Page: 61.69
• % of Pages w/ Rel=Canonical: 7.02%

Check out the new data in OpenSiteExplorer, the Web App, the MozBar and our Labs Tools.

p.p.s. It’s been a while since I did the last headsmacking tip (#16) way back in November of 2009! Hopefully this will spur me to re-visit the series more often.

Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted by randfish

In 2010, SEOmoz’s software business grew from 4,000 – 7,000 subscribers and $3.1mm – $5.7mm in revenue (more transparency on details coming soon). Our customers have been loving our products (our web app now supports nearly 30K campaigns) and our data (over 250 companies use our API), but we’re nowhere near satisfied.

(*note: consulting revenue, which ended in 2009, is not included; 2011 revenue is estimated)

It’s our belief that growth is limited only by how much we can surprise, delight and reward our customers with software that rocks. We want to build more, faster and that’s why today, we’re announcing a new effort in bringing talented software engineers to the SEOmoz team.

Have Engineer Friends? Send ‘Em Our Way

Why should you send your engineer friends to SEOmoz? Three big reasons:

1. They’ll be joining an amazing team at a great company earning top salaries at a place that values their contributions (see below)
2. You’ll get $12,000 in cash* (OK, probably a check, but still!)
3. They’ll also get $12,000 in cash**

We’re seeking 4-5 very talented engineers (possibly more) with experience handling large-scale problems like machine learning, web crawling, building and optimizing web services (APIs), coping with large quantities of data and dealing in massively distributed systems. You can learn more about the job requirements here.

Engineers: Challenging Problems, Brilliant Co-Workers & Some Cool Bonuses Await You, Too

As part of this process, we’re making things interesting for talented engineers, too:

• If you refer/apply yourself, you’ll receive a $12,000 cash hiring bonus**
• If you’re not in the Seattle area, we can offer up to $10,000 to help you (and your family) move to the area
• If you make it to our final interview round (for a chat with our full team), you’ll walk out with a free iPad
• Start your new job right with a $5,000 shopping budget to spend on the hardware/software/accessories of your choice (for either home or office!). Need a new desk and chair set for you spare bedroom to work those odd hours in comfort? Go for it. New laptop? No problem.
• Salaries for engineers at SEOmoz are substantively above the average/median for Seattle (according to Payscale, Glassdoor, SimplyHired). We’ll be on par with the offers you get from Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. in cash, and we’re even better on stock.
• Benefits at SEOmoz rock – we have a great health and dental plan (for you and your family / S.O.), we’ll cover your home Internet and your cellphone bill, 20 days of vacation time annually, transportation options, 401K plans and more.

That said, we should all be picky about where we work and where we interview. It’s not just about the salary, the bonus, the iPad or the shopping spree – there are other things that matter to us (and likely to you) when considering where to work:

• Will I be working on fun, interesting problems that will challenge me professionally and grow my skills?
• Will I learn from my co-workers and influence them positively?
• Does the company compensate generously and appropriately?
• Does my work make a recognizable impact on the company and the world?
• Am I contributing to a mission I believe in and a company whose core values I respect?

It’s my belief that SEOmoz does a solid job on all of these:

• The problems we face include "web scale" challenges – crawling, indexing and building metrics on billions of pages; collecting, filtering and making sense of millions of pieces of social data from Facebook, Twitter and other platforms; serving massive amounts of data to thousands of paying customers in a performant environment.
• The engineering team at SEOmoz is a remarkable and talented group. You’ll be side-by-side with engineers with impressive backgrounds and serious accomplishments on the product and technology side.
• We are in the top quartile of compensation for software engineers in Seattle and our benefits, stock options and perks are considerably above the average.
• What you build will have a direct, measurable impact on our subscribers – and you’ll be able to see it in the membership statistics and hear it directly through our many feedback channels (we get more than 300 messages about our products each week!). And, you won’t just be helping SEOmoz customers – our mission of making it easier for ideas to be shared on the web is carried out every day, and we have tons of great stories and feedback to show it.
• We think it’s great that Google, Bing, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the entire web ecosystem have built such remarkable platforms for sharing information. But, it’s hard to get noticed in all the noise and hard to know what will help make your ideas scale and spread. That where SEOmoz comes in – our software is meant to help companies and organizations of all sizes and shapes to better spread their messages in organic, white hat ways. It’s a mission we’ve found incredibly rewarding and we think you will, too.

Why Do We Need So Much Engineering Talent?

Because SEOmoz is taking off.

Today, we provide some of the web’s best and more popular software to help marketers understand, evaluate and improve their SEO efforts. In the months to come, we’re expanding to help marketers conquer all of organic marketing – from SEO to social media to blogging, local campaigns, content marketing, PR/media and more. This means huge challenges like increasing the size, freshness and quality of our web index (currently ~45billion pages, moving up to 100 billion), building a "mention" index on our Blogscape platform that lets marketers see where their brand names are being used across the web (even if no direct links exist), scaling analytics, improving our machine learning algorithms, exponentially growing our data storage while simultaneously making things faster.

And, unfortunately (or fortunately), our requirements for engineering talent are extremely high. We interview a lot of candidates and need not only the best and brightest in challenging fields (machine learning, large-scale crawling, natural language processing, large-scale distributed systems, etc.), but folks who fit with our core values of TAGFEE.

We owe it to our customers and our mission to build amazing software and that means recruiting remarkable engineers. It’s great to be a profitable startup, but money sitting in the bank won’t do us, or our community any good. We want to put these dollars to work and build something revolutionary – we’re aiming to be the future of organic web/inbound marketing software.

Top 10 Reasons Why Should You Join SEOmoz

Because a post like this wouldn’t be complete without a top 10 list!

1. Interesting, Challenging Problems (strategic and technical, and often on a very large scale)
2. Engineering Centric Company (development and software are the core of our company’s product and the largest team – you won’t be in the "IT department," you’ll be a key member at the heart of SEOmoz)
3. Customer Focused Roadmap (we don’t just build things that sound interesting, we build things we know our customers want, need and use – and when we do, we get great feedback directly from thousands of paying members)
4. Transparency (you’ll always know how the company is doing week-to-week and quarter by quarter. Virtually every metrics except salaries is shared throughout the organization)
5. Profitability (we’re in the black – no burning runways or panicked cries for venture capital. We’ve got a proven business model and we’ve been doubling our revenue for 3 years)
6. Excellent Compensation (We pay in the top range of salaries for software engineers in Seattle based on experience + skills. You won’t have to sacrifice pay to work at a great startup vs. a behemoth)
7. Amazing Co-Workers (Ask anyone in the Seattle tech, marketing or startup community and they’ll tell you – SEOmoz’s people aren’t just talented, they’re truly good people who care about each other and are a pleasure to spend time with)
8. Flat Organization (If you struggle against the politics and bureaucratic inefficiencies of a big organization, you’ll love it here. We have smallish teams, 30 people in total, and only a single layer of management – you’ll report directly to the VP of Engineering)
9. We Listen (Our engineers have contributed substantively to the product roadmap, to new ideas we implement, even to how we decorate the office)
10. Great Benefits, Perks + Fun Stuff (we play Xbox Kinect on Friday afternoons, snacks in the office, 401K plans, flexible and generous vacation time, a great health/dental plan and more on the way)

We hope you’ll send your friends, family members and fellow Venture Brothers addicts our way

* NOTE: The referee will receive this bonus only after the engineer stays employed at SEOmoz for at least 90 days after his or her start date. The referee must also complete and return a w-9 in order to receive the bonus. The referee is responsible for paying taxes on the referral bonus. Also, to qualify for the referral bonus, the successful candidate must have accepted our offer of employment within four months of your referral.

**NOTE: The $12,000 signing bonus applies to all new engineering candidates, but must be paid back if you leave the company prior to 12 months.

p.s. We also want to acknowledge our friends in Cambridge and the crew at EnergySavvy, who are both offering a $10K referral bonus currently (it’s a great time to be, or know, an engineer!)

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Posted by Geoff Kenyon

When Google made their “page speed is now a ranking factor” announcement, it wasn’t a significant new ranking factor, but it is significant because it means Google wants to use usability metrics to help rank pages. Your site speed should be a priority as slow sites decrease customer satisfaction and research has shown that an improvement in site speed can increase conversions.

To better understand how fast the web is (as of February 2011), I collected site speed data from approximately 100 different sites. This data allowed me to create a very close approximation of the equation that Google currently uses to report (in Webmaster Tools) how fast sites are relative to each other:

The x axis in this graph shows the page load time (in seconds) and the y axis represents the per cent of sites that the corresponding time is faster than. So if a page loads in 4.3 seconds, it is faster than 31% of other pages on the web.

• If your site loads in 5 seconds it is faster than approximately 25% of the web
• If your site loads in 2.9 seconds it is faster than approximately 50% of the web
• If your site loads in 1.7 seconds it is faster than approximately 75% of the web
• If your site loads in 0.8 seconds it is faster than approximately 94% of the web

• Minimize HTTP Requests – Your pages will load faster if they have to wait for fewer HTTP requests. This means reducing the number of items that need to be loaded, such as scripts, style sheets, and images.
• Combine all of your CSS into an external file and link to it from the <head> section each page instead of loading it in the HTML of a page. This allows the external page to be cached so that it loads faster. JavaScript should be handled in a similar fashion as CSS.
• Use CSS sprites whenever possible – This combines images used in the background into one image and reduces the number of HTTP requests made.
• Make sure your images are optimized for the web – If you have Photoshop, this can be done by simply clicking “save for web” instead of “save”. By optimizing the formats of the images you are essentially formatting the images in a smarter way so that you end up with a smaller file size. Smashing Magazine has a nice article on optimizing png images.
• Use server side caching – This creates a html page for a URL so that dynamic sites don’t have to build a page each time that URL is requested.
• Use Gzip – Gzip will significantly compress the sent to the browser which then uncompresses the information and displays it for the user. Many sites who use Gzip are able to reduce the file size by upwards of 70%. You can see if sites are using Gzip and how much the page has been compressed by using GID Zip Test.
• Use a Content Delivery Network – Using a CDN allow your users to download information in parallel, helping your site to load faster. CDNs are becoming increasingly affordable with services like Amazon CloudFront.
• Reduce 301 Redirects – Don’t use 301 redirects if possible; definitely don’t stack 301’s on top of each other. 301 redirects force the browser to a new URL and require the browser to wait for the HTTP request to come back.

If you want to do further research on improving your site speed, Google has a good list of helpful articles for optimizing your page speed here that are much more in-depth than the above suggestions. To get suggestions specific to your website, tools like YSLOW and the HTML suggestions in Google Webmaster Tools are great resources.

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